Installation containing several sculptures and found objects, dimensions variable, 2017

One of the main concerns of the work of Sander Breure & Witte van Hulzen is an expanded research into history of portraiture and its relationship with theater. The work encompasses the vast range of human [facial] expressions and how over time certain gestures become associated with and also disassociated from not only emotions but also social positions and activities.

For their long-term performance at Utrecht train station, they worked with a group of actors that performed highly choreographed quotidian activities that almost go unnoticed in the location. However once the commuters noticed the movements and actions of the actors they became witness to a theater of the everyday that suddenly unweaved itself from the fabric of daily life. Taking place for half a year, this work further raised the question when does performance becomes labor and vice versa.

Currently, the duo continues their research into the archive of human gestures, but this time creating a repository of portable head busts that can match sculpted torsos in different positions. Here the sculptures become the performers and are activated in staged scenarios in the space and in relation to the audience. While actors almost become living sculptures, the sculptures, almost become persons, neither managing to completely cross over to the other. The thin membrane between life and death keeps them apart.

The installation A Living Room (2014) in the Teijin Auditorium forms the surrounding for a new performance by artist duo Sander Breure & Witte van Hulzen, entitled A Family Portrait (2014), which is part of the ongoing performance program Stage It! (Part 3): SCRIPTED. The various objects represent the weight and different types of materials in the living room of a Dutch model family: the stainless steel pans, white ceramic tableware, clear wine and drinking glass, wooden furniture structures and the black gray casing of the television.

Artist duo Sander Breure & Witte van Hulzen photographed and weighed every object in the house of an existing Dutch model family, from paperclip to dining table. Subsequently, the total volume of these objects has been redesigned as abstract geometric shapes and in this way, have become disconnected from their original functionality and familiarity. The installation of these objects is a distorted reflection of the diversity of material in an average living room, as well as the way in which economic, social and cultural conditions dictate the circumstances we live in.

We asked Pim van den Berg – member of the city council in the city of Amerfsoort – to make a blind self-portrait every day he was at work in his office. We designed a drawing table with a mirror which was put in his office opposite of his working desk behind which he could make his portraits every morning, literally intervening in his daily office routine.

In an interview, reflecting on his portraits, mr. Van den Berg said: “When after the summer holidays I started shaving with a razor, I also looked more intensively in the mirror. And then there are moments that I recognised while making the drawings; looking at myself estranged from myself. As if your face changes into something else”

The drawings that Pim van den Berg made are exhibited together with the table and a picture of him drawing in his office. .